Autopia.org bad for you?

[BobbyG]

I noticed this several times last week where page looked slightly different in color and Norton popped up a warning. I deleted site temporarily and noted GOOGLE put up a big warning.

Same here. I'll wait a week and check it again......

[newbdetailer]

Luckily MS Security Essenstials sort of caught it for me. It opened Java as well. I ran a scan and it found 4 viruses total. (2 were from Autopia)

This was several days ago.

[Mindflux]

Luckily MS Security Essenstials sort of caught it for me. It opened Java as well. I ran a scan and it found 4 viruses total. (2 were from Autopia)

This was several days ago.

Same thing, Java opened and blamo, got hit by spyware/virus'. I think part of it was the fact there was a java update (recently) that fixed a security hole where it would allow unauthorized installations without prompts.

[akimel]

This may be a silly question, but if the administrators of a chat forum are following ordinary security protocols, how does malware get installed onto their forum?

[gewb]

This may be a silly question, but if the administrators of a chat forum are following ordinary security protocols, how does malware get installed onto their forum?

I can give a possible/plausable explanation - it comes from third parties, i.e., advertising. Larger sites do not host the ads you see on the site, they are served up by other companies. This chain can go many layers deep:

Site you are visiting has three advertisements: A, B and C

Ad A is serverd by farm D which is server by by farms/servers E, F and G
Ad B is...well you get the idea.

Your target site does not have control over the ads that are served up or at least not the farms/servers that push the ads. It is THOSE farms/servers that are pushing the nasties.

Several years ago I had to clean up a computer that had visited a news site, such as CNN, and that site had several Flash based ads on the home page. One of those ads, from a third party server, loaded a trojan via Flash. Before long there were numerous infection that placed 163,000 files in one directory on the hard drive and Windows fell to it's knees - this despite an up-to-date Norton AV program.

It took me six hours to clean up the mess but I saved all of the data.

Autogeek doesn't APPEAR to have these "outside" ads and I hope they never do, despite the lure of advertising revenue.

Regards,
GEWB

[WRAPT C5Z06]

Why so long to get the site back up?

[C. Charles Hahn]

Why so long to get the site back up?

If the problem they're having was caused by a database injection attack it can take quite a while to go through and make sure you've found and removed all entries of bad code....

[akimel]

And even after they get everything cleaned up and restored, it may take Google several days to re-check the site and remove their warning.

[Meghan]

Autogeek doesn't APPEAR to have these "outside" ads and I hope they never do, despite the lure of advertising revenue.

Regards,
GEWB

I promise to keep this site clean so your Norton does not freak out when visiting us! We do not do any outside ads, we like to keep it cozy in here!

[Setec Astronomy]

I can give a possible/plausable explanation - it comes from third parties, i.e., advertising. Larger sites do not host the ads you see on the site, they are served up by other companies.

That would be a good theory--except Autopia dropped their ads a couple months back. They seem to have been having continuous problems since they went to their new server, first the DOS attacks, now this. Although someone seems out to get them, they do seem a little slow on the uptake when these problems crop up. You would think this makes the hosting company look bad and presumably they have larger resources to deal with this sort of thing, but the Google analysis still shows the site as malicious today.

Well, all the more reason to spend time here at AutogeekOnline!